A 2009 Michigan Daily story, reprinted here by the Center for Entrepreneurship, notes the use by faculty of the weblog form to engage in teaching, research, and scholarship These blogs take the form of class blogs, where students are assigned to write on topics relevant to the course; news clipping blogs, where a researcher will follow the scholarship and new papers in his or her field by republishing and noting them in blog format, or the occasional original blog, where the writer gains a wide audience.

Here is but a small slice of the blogging going on at the University of Michigan. Like all on-campus activities, this is wildly decentralized, with no central authority atop the Fleming Building dictating form, style, or system use. There's enough to follow along to audit classes from afar, to track current scholarship in a field, or to watch a new student intern discover on-campus resources in the course of his introduction to campus.

A partial guide to these weblogs is a project called Our Blogosphere, hosted on Michigan's Sitemaker system, which has a very incomplete list of faculty efforts. Some of these links are pulled from that list.

Student weblogs

Melissa King's Discovering Ann Arbor is a blog written as a course assignment. She writes:

As an Art History major, my long-term goal is to apply to graduate school to become an art conservator. This semester I lucked out in getting two pretty awesome internships. One of the internships is working directly with the conservators at the Kelsey Archaeological Museum on campus to start getting some training in the field. My other internship is working at the Maps Library within the graduate library, where I'm working to put together some exhibits.

The weblog she has put together has some stunning photos and descriptions of exhibits she is working on, such as a well-preserved 1808 map of the remote island of Saint Helena found at the University of Michigan Map Library.

Course weblogs

Brian Porter-Szűcs, an associate history professor, has students blog their responses to class readings and search for other relevant material on the Internet and post it on the class blog. The Modern Catholicism blog is the result of his course "Catholicism and the Modern World," History 489 for winter 2009, which includes a complete set of course readings, plus the results of more than a dozen students writing about and discussing the work.

Department weblogs

The Michigan Linguistics Department News is a weblog from that department which serves as a central place to post things like seminar information, abstracts of notable papers that have just been published, and the occasional Scrabble tournament announcement. The weblog has been running since September 2007, and by looking at its categories you get a good idea of what the department's focus is, who is working on what parts of things, and where you as a potentially interested student or faculty member might fit in.

Faculty weblogs

Only a few faculty members keep weblogs; the demands of scholarship and publication are such that for some, the time spent on blogging would detract from the primary metrics by which they are evaulated in their field.

Not so for Juan Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. His prolific weblog, Informed Comment: Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion, draws a regular set of comments from his daily discussions of Middle East events, which are generally informed by a thorough set of links to primary sources and to scholarship.

Cosma Shalzi's Three Toed Sloth weblog is another extraordinary effort. Cosma used to be at Michigan in the Complex Studies department; he has left for Carnegie Mellon but has kept his blog active on the University of Michigan servers. Anyone who can keep up a steady output with a Borgesian set of categories like these deserves a look:

Afghanistan and Central Asia; Anticontrarianism; Biology; Complexity; Corrupting the Young; Creationism; Cthulhiana; Enigmas of Chance; Food; Friday Cat Blogging; Heard About Pittsburgh, PA; Incestuous Amplification; IQ; Islam; Learned Folly; Linkage; Mathematics; Minds, Brains, and Neurons; Modest Proposals; Networks; Philosophy; Physics; Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime; Postcards; Power Laws; Psychoceramica; Scientifiction and Fantastica; Self-Centered; The Beloved Republic; The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts; The Commonwealth of Letters; The Continuing Crises; The Dismal Science; The Eternal Silence of These Infinite Spaces; The Great Transformation; The Natural Science of the Human Species; The Progressive Forces; The Running-Dogs of Reaction; Writing for Antiquity

This is but a very small slice of the sort of work that's hiding inside umich.edu Web servers.

Edward Vielmetti edits the psychoceramica section on AnnArbor.com. Reach him at edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com